Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Fiction The 6 year-old Jack and 4 year-old Jill had a small, little fight.  Jack felt guilty.  “I’m sorry,” he said hugging his sister very affectionately. During the unexpected hug Jill’s hand touched Jack’s little penis.  “What’s this thing you’ve got here?”  she asked groping Jack’s groin.  “That’s the pipe for carrying urine,” said Jack. “But I don’t have such a pipe,” protested Jill. “You’re a girly, silly.” “So what?” “Stop being stupid.” Jill went to the kitchen where mum was cooking dinner.  “Why don’t I have a pipe for carrying urine?” she asked. “You’re not a boy,” said mum. “So what?” asked Jill. “Only boys have the pipe...” “Why should boys have all the fun?” asked Jill. Mum  looked into the living room.  Pop was sitting there, his legs stretched out on the tea poi and reading Vikram Seth’s Two Lives .  Mum and Pop, both, worked in offices.  Both had to get up early in the morning.  Both had to work their asses out in

“Civilization is skin-thin: scratch it and savagery bleeds out.”  [Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations ] Nobel laureate William Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), tells the story of a group of school boys plane-wrecked on an uninhabited island.  The leadership of the democratic and sensitive Ralph is soon usurped by the savage Jack, and childhood innocence soon gives way to uncanny cruelty on the island.  The novel is the story of evil in the human being and his society. Seeing that there are no adults to restrain them, the children are initially excited.  But Ralph emerges as a leader reminding them of their responsibility to find ways of returning home.  Ralph is a moral character in the novel.  His is a cultivated morality, the product of human civilisation.  Jack, on the other hand, is the uncultivated savage.  He soon wrenches the leadership from Ralph and becomes a dictator who imposes both his will and his savagery on the group.  Most of the ch

Evil is coeval with mankind.  Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) said repeatedly in his widely studied Canterbury Tales , “ Love of money is the root of all evil .”  How much can we alter that statement today, six centuries later? When Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) made his unforgettable Doctor Faustus utter the following lines:             Had I as many souls as there be stars,             I’d give them all for Mephistophilis, he created a character who would be perfectly at home in our own time with all its plethora of sensual delights .    Now, how evil are sensual delights? “ Fair is foul, and foul is fair ,” said Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) witches in Macbeth .  They were expressing something much more than an epigram on hypocrisy or political chicanery.  If we want, we can even apply the epigram to many of the contemporary sensual delights. We can apply that witchy epigram, moreover, to a lot of things today.  The law today, for example, protects the foul.